A World-Building Experiment: Heroes & Homelands (pt. 3)

 Over the past two weeks I have created a simple D&D retro-clone called Heroes & Homelands that is intended to be easily copy/pasted and edited to make new bespoke games as I need them. You can get the current version of it in .PDF here, or in .PDF, .html, .odt, and .docx formats in a PWYW bundle on itch.io.

Then I sat down and brainstormed a campaign I called "Into the Mistlands", a surreal magical adventure into something like a weird psychocosm. Here is the pich:

Illusionists added to Heroes & Homelands

 Just a quick update to say that I have updated Heroes & Homelands to a v.0.6 that includes an illusionist class, spells, and a unique mechanic for illusions going wrong.

Get it here!

or get it in multiple formats here!

A World-Building Experiment: Heroes & Homelands (pt. 2)

 So, now that I have a mechanical framework, let me share with you what I have so far in terms of the campaign design.

(Unless you are someone invited into this campaign, in which case, there are going to be spoilers of a sort.)

I will be using the campaign planning techniques I described in the article Game System Hacking 101.

The Vision Statement

I want to provide PCs with a setting that is a journey into places of wonder and weirdness. The further they journey the more ethereal, strange, and magical the setting becomes; a movement from the Mundane to pure psychocosm.

The setting will have dark moments, but overall be more focused on the strange and inexplicable. Monsters are not there to torment, enslave and devour, so much as they are just so alien that their natures and human understanding just don't fit well together. The PCs will be rewarded for pushing farther from a place of stable reality ("The Homelands") and into a farther realm.

I intend to take a lot of inspiration from The Ultraviolet Grasslands and Black City.

I also intend to use existing modules and materials such as my collection of DCC modules and the Hill Cantons collection when I need quick material.

Here's my Poster Pitch:

Heroes of the Mistlands

A Mystical and Psychedelic Saga Through a World Warped by Magic for Heroes & Homelands.

200 years ago the Great Assembly, an academy of magicians in the East of the continent of Eraskas were on the cusp of bringing Man into a new golden age. Their experiments in magic had held back a terrible plague, and cleared the Eastern Marches of many of the monsters that lurked in the hinterlands. And then some grand experiment went wrong. All of the lowlands of Eraskas were covered in swirling, brightly colored mists that brought with them strange phenomena, fey creatures, and warped everything it touched. Only a few Northern kingdoms, protected by the Raski Mountian range and the Great Shelf were spared. They are called the Homelands. They have survived in an uneasy peace, ruled over by an emerging group of Plutocrats who work hard to control every aspect of life in the Homelands.

You are a villager of Tollun, a small silver-mining town on cliffs that overlook the mists. With the vein exhausted and trouble on the roads, the town is starting to become desperate for new ways to support itself. The temptation of plunder form the ruined cities of the mists is strong. And somewhere far off on the Eastern Horizon, a voice is calling those blessed with the ears to hear...

Inspired By

Movies: The Winds of Change, Oblivion, Jack the Giant Killer, Stardust, Mirrormask, Fantastic Planet

Video Games: Legend of Mana, Final Fantasy IX, Elden Ring, Divinity: Original Sin II, Starbound, Majesty

Music: Vol IV - Black Sabbath, Solar Hits - Glitter Wizard, Le Roi est Mort, Vive le Roi - Enigma

For this game, I will be customizing Heroes & Homelands.

Books: Eyes of the Overworld by Jack Vance, The Hand of Oberon by Roger Zelazny, Magic's Price by Mercedes Lackey, A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony, Stealing Magic by Tanya Huff, The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett

Other Role-Playing Games: Numenera, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City, The Hill Cantons, Overlight, Cha'alt

Next Steps

So this tells me a few things that I want both in the world and in the mechanics.

In the World

• A home base where the PCs feel pressed to risk the mists, either for the well-being of the community or for a higher cause.
• A place that feels familiar and Earthly (or perhaps middle-earthly) as a starting place, but that allows rapid travel into an otherworldly place.
• NPCs who care about the PCs and show them support, and who are suffering from hard times.
• A world where magic was once wondrous and made a better world, but is now constrained out of fear.
• Mysterious lands where the old and familiar has been transformed into something new. 
• Regions where the magic takes on different character.
• A stifling element to the culture that might encourage misfits to leave: an oppressive old money-driven Plutocracy, combined with a failing, power-grasping aristocracy, and a cultural climate with a touch of Janteloven might be just right.
• (I suspect an early-modern Nordic theme might be just right.)
• I don't want to make the religion oppressive: the characters will want a strong moral guiding light and a sense that there is something worth protecting and rebuilding. But perhaps a culture that abuses the religion might work.
• A divine being or place to encourage PCs to begin a pilgrimage at some point.
• Leads on lost arcane power that might make life easier in the Homelands that requires deeper journeys into the Other.
• A small fragment of a once-larger pantheon, so that PCs might discover lost ways that make their homeland make more sense.
• Some hints of the lost wonders. 
• Some lost Kingdoms the PCs will know something about from History that were destroyed by the Mists.
  

In the Mechanics

• A system for PCs and things to be warped by the magic of the mist.
• Tables for encounters and wonders that are coded by themed regions, like "illusory", "dark", "sensual", "wild", "primordial", "mechanical" and "holy." (I might be able to draw some ideas by revisiting my old Magic: The Gathering decks.) 
• Tables for encounters that get more strange and dangerous the farther from the "Homelands" the players go.
• Tables for discoveries to become more powerful and wondrous as the PCs head Outwards.
• The Homelands can have familiar fantasy races like Dwarves and Halflings, but once out into the wilds, I want new creatures... perhaps a people transformed to match their theme in each region.
• A pantheon based on an existing one, but fragmented and reduced in its scope.
• A custom class based on survival in a world where the knowledge of a standard ranger will be initially troubled. And a custom class based on dealing with the Mists. 
• I may consider removing druids and switching rangers to AD&D style Divine / Arcane casters.
• Barbarians don't fit for a starting homelands character, nor does it fit the more fantastical theme. This is a place for Kugel the Clever moreso than Conan the Cimmerian
• Dual-class rules that let wanderers change (dual-class?) to custom classes based on survival in a magical world.
• Abstracted supply mechanics to help facilitate long journeys. I might hack some further material out of Deathtrap Lite for it.
• For the sake of familiarity, a world that feels more Early Modern that Medieval. So muskets, renaissance-era muskets. Perhaps a higher base AC for PCs so that they can be more flexible in combat without. (All stuff that can be pillaged from Lamentations of the Flame Princess.)

In the next article, I will create a version 0.1 of the new RPG based on these notes.

Thematically, after thinking about people living in high, rugged mountains, mention of Janteloven, and Plutocracy, I think I will use elements of Swiss and Danish culture as a template for creating my setting. 

A World-Building Experiment: Heroes & Homelands (pt. 1)

 

So I am starting a new campaign this weekend, and I have an idea for the world that I want to develop.

I've decided that, in order to get me producing more content for this blog I am going to do my campaign planning here on the blog.using tools I have presented in a number of my game hacking and experience design articles. I am going to discuss my world ideas first, then consider how they are going to be reflected in the game, and in the end, I will have what should amount to a pretty solid custom TTRPG.

But to do that I needed a starting place.

Defining a Campaign by its PCs

Setting map created with
Campaign Cartographer 3

 I'm doing things a bit out of order here. I have quite a few articles planned, and finally a good rhythm in which to get them done, but I wanted to share an example of world-building done backwards that I attempted last month.

Quick Context

My wife and I have had constant interruptions from family emergencies to illness to extreme levels of stress that have prevented us from getting a role-playing campaign off the ground since late August. We were getting to the point where she was feeling frustrated, un-creative, and had no idea what she wanted to play.

In the past when we have had this kind of creative logjam I have simply made up a short scenario and handed her a character for it I thought she'd find compelling. We'd play a one-shot (IRL, usually a three-shot with the meandering way we like to play) and  that would be enough to get us grounded in the game, which suddenly got us a better sense of what we actually wanted to do.

A few weeks ago I decided to do both that, but also give her choices and try an experiment in world-building at the same time. I wrote up eight characters, each with a one-page backstory and statistics for Low Fantasy Gaming, one of my favourites for a good swashbuckling, high-action adventure. Each backstory had common elements, bits of history, common contacts, and small samplings of lore to play with. I figured one of them would sing to her, and I could mash up the plots to Torchlight II's act III and Diablo III's acts I & II with a touch of Warhammer: Vermintide II  and a copious amount of Legend of the Bones to have a good gothic fantasy.

I made it specifically a point to ensure that each PC had a family member who could be a useful PC, connections to some interesting cultural institution that would need some history, and would find themselves poised to get involved with one faction or another.

I've put the characters behind a spoiler if you don't want to sift through the specific content and want to just get to the conclusions I have come to.

Campaign Reports and PWYW Preview of Undeadwood WWRPG

I really enjoyed creating podcasts for my players to summzarize our last play sessions and build up lore for Xen this past Spring. I've decided to do that and take it up to 11 for my current campaign Undeadwood Weird West RPG, especially as I have been building a game for scratch that has turned out to be pretty darned good.

And so, with two episodes now live online that are a mix of developer's blog, world building, and play reports, I wanted to share that podcast with you here. It will be live on major podcasting platforms over the next month or so.

Sharing Your World Enhances it

One of the great things about sharing a world that you're creating with others is that the way others interact with it, the characters they want to be in it, and the kind of things they suggest putting in (either directly or by way of asking questions,) it can really help energize your creative process.

The World I Am Currently Building

In my game Undeadwood the player characters start as people who have been transported on a mysterious Phantom train crewed by demonic entities to a pocket dimension called Wonkatonkwa.

The characters arrive in 1869 with no memory of anything that's happened since 1867. To them, the Civil War is over and the grudges were starting to smooth over, a new host of opportunities were opening, and Manifest Destiny is at its high point in American Consciousness.

During character generation, they can find themselves in possession of strange objects. One of the Pin my test group started the game with $16, and a photograph of a recently assassinated politician from the north with an X-drawn across it. 

Wonkatonkwa is a haunted country. Hoodoo magic, Santeria, Alchemy, and Pow-wow rites all work. At night, the spectral forms of people who have died in the desert rise up to drain the life out of the living so that they can once again experience the pleasures of being a living being themselves. The Devil himself hangs out had a crossroad in the eastern part of the county. And creatures from American folklore like hodags, the wampus, and the snallygaster plague the people who have no choice but to make a life there.